I was trying in the normal course of repelling adverse events to maintain an alliance between concentrated eyes and spine while laughing my ass off in a tight defensive mode when something in my neck popped. And my head wobbled. And my knees buckled. And my pants dropped. And my jaw fell.

I had hoped at first to pay it no mind. But my mind does not often respond to direct commands. One path soon led shiftlessly close to another, for which I blame gravity when I am able to get away with it. I can’t say for sure that I missed any thin thread of meandering thought in the jockeying for position, but I did. Next, in a heretofore confusing order, I dismissed, pretended, misread, forgot. Then I lost it for good, bad, better, or worse, when swinging wildly for the fences and missing a cagey disease-carrying fly. I realized right away I had swung too hard. It was only a lazy fly that any decent outfielder would have caught with ease but the dust swirled like a veil. I understood due to a sterling education since forgotten that diseases begin to spread in exactly that way. Sort of. I also knew right away that I was going to need Tommy John surgery when that so-called innocent pop spread venomously from neck, through indentured spine, and down to vulnerable elbow. Swinging too hard also killed Babe Ruth, Edsel Ford, Rock Hudson, Clarabelle, Divine, Mr. Goodbar, and Mr. Roberts in his very own neighborhood. As a result, my elbow could hardly lift my skin. My despondent soul immediately resented carrying the load.

“All of this dust stings the blurry whites of my eyes.”

“Sweep it away with a sharp stick and a broom.”

“But, that whirs the blur worse.”

Troubling adverse events tend to occupy vast tracts of empty space inside of an obsessive-compulsive mind like a tribe of itinerant squatters taking over a vacant casino parking lot to construct a rowdy favela. Once the poles for the tents get dug in, and the dirt forms into clumps, and the mud clings, and the beat bumps, and the harmony blends, and the dreamy eyes start to roam, then the erections go up and up. They tend not to stop. It becomes a never ending struggle to move the intruders out.

“Achtung, scheisskopf.”

“Say what?”

Look at all of those bumbling historians of ancient Europe still stuck in a nitwittery state over feeble cousins porking the wrinkled butts of fey lords and uncles. Old bones get dug up in parking lots to be tagged, bagged, and reburied again amid more titter on Nitwitter. Why not trace the crucial crux back to the axis in Africa between Bobby Blue Bland, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye? Why not rhapsodize in black and green as well as teal, aqua, and royal blue? I know that aristocratic flies like to alight a lot on the same old shit. But still.

The overwrought fear of disease-carrying flies is often cited as a cause for detonations of stinky fragmentation bombs, demolitions of indegenous love nests and huts, and demarcations of lines between snorting sides. It’s easy that way to point a finger at the ugly other side and bray. The other side is always wrong. Not only the most abject asses bray. That’s why both sides do it so convincingly.

The crows that are ganging up on the red-tailed hawks in the Santa Cruz Mountains to take over outposts in the tallest redwood trees bray most of the day like sniveling scum sucking weasels, the hyperbolic fuck wads. No crow can soar like a majestic hawk, but they can pretend. Gangs are able to sublimate a lot of individual failures that way, much like politicians, who also shiftlessly blame gravity for spectacular inadequacies while faking it. As icons on the other end of the totem pole, rhinos get down in the beckoning mud and do it loud and nasty. Along with rattlers and cobras. And puny douche Putin, too.

As events on increasingly dry land culminate in more powdered shit that rises to blow in the wind, and until SpaceX is ready to take me up and away and save my mulish ass from the robots who will toy with me like a pet or a doll or a flimsy disjointed soldier liable to break at the slightest provocation, I attempt when the air is warm, which is nearly all of the time now, to flee to the 2/3 of the planet where there is no need for jockeying. In the one world ocean there is plenty of room to boogaloo, shimmy, and twist if you are able to withstand the pressure and breathe deeply at unimaginable fathoms leading to a chill bottom where there is nowhere more cool.

The ocean gets deeper than any void that any weaselly gang politician has been heretofore able to usurp and exploit for nefarious split ends. Weasels are known in numerous fey circles to be notorious mouth breathers, which leaves the snout free to sniff lots of shit on the surface, where they fit in so splendidly well. There is no better habitat to study disease carrying pathogens than the piles of superficial shit teeming with flies, weasels, and politicians. The iconic imagery of it makes not only my sore elbow twitch, but my guts, and sphincter, and hidden cringing viscera as well.

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding.”

“I think my first words when I came out from under the anesthetic were hot damn.”

As a logical conclusion, therefore, if not technically a redundant corollary, I was taking my regular superficial turn at the sticky tiller of a small boat traveling due south of the Santa Cruz Harbor. The stickiness was largely due to the spilling of prior assorted guts, not all of which had ever been my own. I was continuing my search for the humpback whale who appears to be light taupe, unless he more accurately represents dark ecru on the eternal color wheel, to whom I still owed a sincere apology for past transgressions. Sort of.

I was skimming the surface of Monterey Bay above the Soquel Hole, which is a profound 1200 feet deep, trolling for salmon in a typically half-ass, distracted manner. My thoughts were merely shallow, not entirely empty and bereft. James Brown was progressively urging me to keep on my good foot. The volume was high. I had no argument with that. I was breathing in a proportionally shallow mode, per accepted norms. I checked my charts and continued relatively on course, content to settle for skimming the surface as a rational alternative to meaningful change that requires more than I’m willing to put out. In that regard, I’m no dummy. Like, duh.

The humpback whale who appears to be light taupe had been avoiding me, if not mocking me as well, for no single specific cause, I was certain. Shit just adds up. What more can seven billion bereft humans do except blame it on flies? So how can I blame the humpback whale as well? I can’t, that’s how, and therefore don’t. That much blame is best left to politicians. I continue in my own small way to lord it all over a bunch of tinier animals with small defense mechanisms. Snails, mice, and of course, when I can, flies. If I could painlessly get rid of a bunch of weasels, I would. Politicians, too. I’m pretty sure that would be enough to make my elbow feel a lot better post-op. That should be good enough for me.